The B-Eye Bridge

Friday, November 22, 2002

Nearly a month has passed since the announcement of the Siebel-Microsoft alliance shook the CRM landscape. Still, its strategic underpinnings and eventual impact remain unclear. The winner in the deal, of course, is Microsoft. On the flip side, the losers are such CRM vendors as Onyx, Pivotal, FrontRange and others that have pinned their hopes to early adoption of .NET. With the Siebel-Microsoft hype, much of the wind has been taken out of their sails. But what does the partnership mean for Siebel?

Thursday, November 21, 2002

In 2002, business intelligence (BI) and analytic technology has reached the apex of importance. Whether the goal is inventory control, financial modeling, customer retention, or even national security, the creation of "knowledge" from the whole cloth of raw information is no longer of debatable value; often, it is the source of value.

Managing your organization and aligning cost and revenue to your financial and organizational goals have been especially tough this year. Companies are searching for ways to bring IT investments into line with their most critical business priorities. This new mandate has created a strategic shift from transactioncentric to informationcentric approaches that offer collaboration and information that can drive intelligent action and decisions into the organization. This innovative way of thinking is the impetus behind a new class of software capabilities now evolving from the roots of business intelligence (BI) and decision support that help organizations manage performance in a methodical, coordinated manner.

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Most organizations will continue with conservative IT investment in 2003, which in some cases will lead them to sacrifice strategic planning for short-term ROI, according to research by Giga Information Group on IT trends for 2003. This breakdown of long-term strategic planning is one of the more alarming trends, analysts say.

According to the just-released findings of IDC’s study, The Financial Impact of Business Analytics, analytics projects positively impact an organization’s bottom line. Investments in analytics are providing enormous benefits to companies in a wide range of industries and geographies. Organizations who have successfully implemented and utilized analytic applications have realized returns ranging from 17% to more than 2000% with a median return on investment(ROI) of 112%

At the Business Objects International User Conference this week, Business Objects was beating its drum to more than a 1,000 attendees about its upcoming products and plans for the business intelligence (BI) market. With a history of profitability, a war chest of more than $300 million in cash, and a strong portfolio of customers, Business Objects is well prepared to endure the current economy and take the lead as a strategic supplier of BI. In fact, the company outlined how it plans to accomplish its goal of becoming a $1-billion company in three years with more insight into a broad set of its upcoming products.

In business, the need for quality analytics has never been higher. Managers are working hard to provide the foundation and tools for analysis that will lead to the knowledge that can change a business's course of action. This effort often involves the implementation of online analytic processing (OLAP).

Users and analysts said Oracle's (Nasdaq: ORCL) focus on existing products' financial performance, rather than technology announcements, at its OracleWorld conference in San Francisco was reassuring in the current economic climate.

With the difficult economic climate clearly an issue for users -- attendance at the conference was visibly down on previous years -- Oracle's focus was firmly on how to cope with tightening IT budgets and lowering the total cost of ownership .

The SAS Institute, a business intelligence vendor, has acquired certain technology assets of Verbind, a provider of real-time customer behavior and event-triggering technology. The extended product will allow users to determine significant changes in customer behavior as they occur in real-time, according to the company.

PeopleSoft recently announced a Supplier Rating System (SRS) analytics module as part of its Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) suite.
SRS offers a structured logical approach to analyzing supplier performance; its intent is to help companies control costs by improving supply chain efficiency.

Although Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management technologies overlap only in select areas, we have chosen to approach both topics within a single report since these sectors are currently performing relatively well compared to the overall IT market. While it would be an overstatement to assert that these sectors have experienced uninterrupted growth and valuation increases, they are among the few sectors that have displayed some degree of resiliency in the face of a challenging technology spending environment, and are widely expected to be among the first segments to benefit when IT spending ramps up again.